Current patient monitoring has not changed significantly over the last 30 years. While sensor technology has improved and expanded, the monitoring technology itself has gone through the evolution from paper line tracings to CRT to LCD displays. But the way the data has been displayed has not significantly changed over that time (i.e. the line on the paper is the same line that is displayed on the LCD screen). Doctors face a fundamental challenge that the information they need to answer very specific clinical questions is not presented to them in an intuitive way.
There are physiological measurements that directly measure the body using sensors that record measurements like heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, etc. There are also physiological measurements or indexes that are calculated by combining direct measurements; examples include the pressure reactivity index (PRx) and the starling curve (the ability of the heart to change its force of contraction and therefore stroke volume in response to changes in venous return). Medical Researchers often discover new physiological relationships which they render as an index or scale.
However, when one wants to present a new physiological index or present the calculated data in a novel way (a novel Virtual Monitor (VM)), the only way at present is to build a new instrument, take the instrument through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certification process and clinical trials, and attempt to sell it on the open market. Current solutions are based on a one algorithm-one device model, which is physically unscalable beyond more than a few algorithms with their associated sensory devices.